Government Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

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Outer space is no longer just for global superpowers and large multinational corporations. Developing countries, start-ups, universities, and even high schools can now gain access to space. In 2024, a record 2,849 objects were launched into space. The commercial satellite industry saw global revenue rise to $285 billion in 2023, driven largely by the growth of SpaceX's Starlink constellation. While the democratization of space is a positive development, it has introduced ... an ethical quandary that I call the "double dual-use dilemma." The double dual-use dilemma refers to how private space companies themselves–not just their technologies–can become militarized and integrated into national security while operating commercially. Space companies fluidly shift between civilian and military roles. Their expertise in launch systems, satellites, and surveillance infrastructure allows them to serve both markets, often without clear regulatory oversight. Companies like Walchandnagar Industries in India, SpaceX in the United States, and the private Chinese firms that operate under a national strategy of the Chinese Communist Party called Military-Civil Fusion exemplify this trend, maintaining commercial identities while actively supporting defense programs. This blurring of roles, including the possibility that private space companies may develop their own weapons, raises concerns over unchecked militarization and calls for stronger oversight.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in the military and in the corporate world.

In their peer-reviewed book, In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, [left-leaning political scientists] Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that public health authorities, the mainstream media, and progressive elites often pushed pandemic measures without weighing their costs and benefits, and ostracized people who expressed good-faith disagreement. The book grew out of research Macedo was doing on the ways progressive discourse gets handicapped by a refusal to engage with conservative or outside arguments. "Covid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan bias," he said. At times, scientific and health authorities acted less like neutral experts and more like self-interested actors, engaging in PR efforts to downplay uncertainty, missteps or conflicts of interest. Reports by Johns Hopkins (2019), the World Health Organization (2019), the state of Illinois (2014) and the British government (2011) had all expressed ambivalence or caution about the kind of quarantine measures that were soon taken. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a wargaming exercise in October 2019, shortly before the pandemic began, to simulate a deadly coronavirus pandemic; the findings explicitly urged that "[t]ravel and trade … be maintained even in the face of a pandemic." A WHO paper in 2019 said that some measures – such as border closures and contact tracing – were "not recommended in any circumstances". "In inflation-adjusted terms," Macedo and Lee write, "the United States spent more on pandemic aid in 2020 than it spent on the 2009 stimulus package and the New Deal combined." The economic strain on poor and minority Americans was particularly severe. Teachers' unions ... painted school re-openings as "rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny" ... despite the fact that minority and poor students were most disadvantaged by remote learning.

Note: Pandemic policies led to one of the greatest wealth transfers in history. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on COVID corruption and media manipulation.

Starting this week, I once again have the privilege of teaching law students about the First Amendment. I am in the United States on a green card, and recent events suggest that I should be careful in what I say–perhaps even about free speech. The Trump administration is working to deport immigrants, including green-card holders, for what appears to be nothing more than the expression of political views with which the government disagrees. These actions ... make it difficult to work out how to teach cases that boldly proclaim this country is committed to a vision of free speech that, right now, feels very far away. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has been–is there any other way to describe it?–rounding up dissidents. To more easily chase down people with ideas it dislikes, the government is asking universities for the names and nationalities of people who took part in largely peaceful protests and engaged in protected speech. Exactly what kind of expression gets you in trouble is not clear–no doubt that's partly the point. [Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Troy] Edgar repeatedly refused to answer [NPR journalist Michel] Martin's simple question: "Is any criticism of the United States government a deportable offense?" A 2010 Supreme Court decision upheld a law banning certain forms of speech that are classified as "material support" to foreign terrorist groups–in that case, the speech included training designated groups on how to pursue their aims peacefully. But even in that case, which upheld a stunningly broad speech restriction, the Court also insisted that ... advocacy of unlawful action is protected so long as it is not done in coordination with terrorist groups. This ... rests "at the heart of the First Amendment": "viewpoint discrimination is uniquely harmful to a free and democratic society."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and immigration enforcement corruption.

New chat logs released by the House Judiciary Committee this week show the extraordinary lengths the FBI went to behind the scenes to shut down any discussion of Hunter Biden's laptop in October 2020 after the New York Post broke the story. The conversations, withheld by the FBI under Director Chris Wray, show that senior leadership issued an internal "gag order" on the laptop. The FBI had been in possession of the abandoned MacBook Pro for 10 months by that stage, after computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac handed it over. The FBI's forensic analysts quickly determined the laptop belonged to Hunter, had not been tampered with or altered in any way, and was suitable to be used in court. Yet the chat logs show that senior FBI officials instructed agents to say "No comment" when asked about the laptop during regular meetings with social media companies before the 2020 election. The FBI had spent weeks warning Facebook and Twitter about election interference in the form of Russian disinformation and had told Twitter to be on guard for a "hack and leak" operation "likely" involving Hunter Biden. In other words, the FBI "prebunked" The Post's story so that the social media companies immediately censored it. The FBI knew The Post had received a hard-drive copy of the laptop from Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani because it had a covert surveillance warrant on the former mayor's iCloud.

Note: It took more than a year for New York Times and Washington Post to finally admit that the laptop was genuine. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and intelligence agency corruption.

In 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was condemned as a quack and considered a pariah by the medical field for co-authoring a public declaration questioning the efficacy of Covid lockdowns. In an October 2020 email to Dr. Anthony Fauci that was later leaked online, [former director of the National Institutes of Health Francis] Collins called Bhattacharya a "fringe epidemiologist," and urged a "quick and devastating published takedown" of his declaration. Bhattacharya is now the new director of the NIH. He [said] Collins has since apologized for his comments–but only in private. Bhattacharya said of Collins: "I've been praying for him ever since I found out that he'd written that email. Reconciliation is really possible. Even if people disagree with each other fundamentally, even hate each other–and I'd never hated him and never will." Bhattacharya "wants to extend [Fauci] the same grace that I want to extend to everybody. I think he was deeply wrong in his scientific ideas in 2020, but I believe ... he was trying to do what he viewed as the best for the American people." President Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci for his extreme Covid response measures. The first step to rebuilding trust, Bhattacharya argues, is transparency. A database on doctors' relationships with Big Pharma already exists, thanks to the 2010 Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which allows anyone to search for and view all pharmaceutical money doctors have received since 2013. Producing a similar website that shows where scientists get their research funding, and the results of their research, "would be a really productive way to reestablish trust ... "The work of the NIH in particular affects basically every single aspect of biomedical research. And of course, there are pecuniary interests involved. People make money off of the results of the research."

Note: Bhattacharya's tone of reconciliation after being smeared in the media sets a powerful example. He recently received the top intellectual freedom award from the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters. Top leaders in the field of medicine and science have spoken out about the rampant corruption and conflicts of interest in those industries. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on science corruption.

Skydio, with more than $740m in venture capital funding and a valuation of about $2.5bn, makes drones for the military along with civilian organisations such as police forces and utility companies. The company moved away from the consumer market in 2020 and is now the largest US drone maker. Military uses touted on its website include gaining situational awareness on the battlefield and autonomously patrolling bases. Skydio is one of a number of new military technology unicorns – venture capital-backed startups valued at more than $1bn – many led by young men aiming to transform the US and its allies' military capabilities with advanced technology, be it straight-up software or software-imbued hardware. The rise of startups doing defence tech is a "big trend", says Cynthia Cook, a defence expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based-thinktank. She likens it to a contagion – and the bug is going around. According to financial data company PitchBook, investors funnelled nearly $155bn globally into defence tech startups between 2021 and 2024, up from $58bn over the previous four years. The US has more than 1,000 venture capital-backed companies working on "smarter, faster and cheaper" defence, says Dale Swartz from consultancy McKinsey. The types of technologies the defence upstarts are working on are many and varied, though autonomy and AI feature heavily.

Note: For more, watch our 9-min video on the militarization of Big Tech.

While attempting to control the weather might sound like science fiction, countries have been seeding clouds for decades to try to make rain or snow fall in specific regions. Invented in the 1940s, seeding involves a variety of techniques including adding particles to clouds via aircraft. It is used today across the world in an attempt to alleviate drought, fight forest fires and even to disperse fog at airports. In 2008, China used it to try to stop rain from falling on Beijing's Olympic stadium. But experts say that there is insufficient oversight of the practice, as countries show an increasing interest in this and other geoengineering techniques as the planet warms. The American Meteorological Society has said that "unintended consequences" of cloud seeding have not been clearly shown – or ruled out – and raised concerns that unanticipated effects from weather modification could cross political boundaries. And there have been instances when cloud seeding was used deliberately in warfare. The United States used it during "Operation Popeye" to slow the enemy advance during the Vietnam War. In response, the UN created a 1976 convention prohibiting "military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques". A number of countries have not signed the convention. Researcher Laura Kuhl said there was "significant danger that cloud seeding may do more harm than good", in a 2022 article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Note: Regenerative farming is far safer and more promising than geoengineering for stabilizing the climate. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on geoengineering and science corruption.

The Department of Homeland Security is effectively gutting key civil rights offices within the agency, slashing the number of staff at the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. Each of these offices was created by Congress, but DHS has decided to move ahead anyway, saying they "have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles." Four days later, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts student with a valid F-1 visa, was pulled off a sidewalk in Massachusetts and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. The Department of Homeland Security, whose agents surround Ozturk in the video, has a long history of civil and human rights abuses. DHS is home to the largest law enforcement cohort in the United States. Its agents have extraordinary powers to stop, arrest, and detain citizens and noncitizens alike throughout the country. When Congress created DHS in 2002, it ... created the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) to provide oversight to guard against abuses. Every year, CRCL files a report to Congress. In its fiscal year (FY) 2023 report, for example, CRCL reported that it received over 3,000 allegations of misconduct and opened 758 investigations into issues ranging from treatment of travelers at airports to discrimination by DHS law enforcement to sexual abuse in DHS custody to deaths in DHS custody.

Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.

When the final, declassified records from the John F. Kennedy assassination files were posted on the National Archives' website last week, the first document researchers and reporters searched for was White House adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s June 1961 memorandum to the president titled "CIA Reorganization." "How could I have been so stupid as to let them proceed?" President John Kennedy asked his advisers following the CIA's infamous fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Beyond the fact that the U.S. invasion of Cuba was an egregious act of aggression – violating international law and Cuba's sovereignty – its failure was a catastrophic embarrassment for JFK, only weeks into his White House tenure. Kennedy held CIA director Allen Dulles, and his deputy for covert operations Richard Bissell, personally responsible for deceiving him on the prospects for success of the ill-planned paramilitary assault. Indeed, as he processed the implications of the failed invasion, Kennedy vented his desire to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." That concept was more than angry rhetoric; the president actually set in motion a secret set of deliberations on breaking up the intelligence, espionage and covert action functions of the CIA and subordinating its operations to the State Department. The CIA's operational branches would be "reconstituted" under a new agency.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the JFK assassination.

The CIA claimed to have confirmed the existence of the Ark of the Covenant by way of remote viewing – aka extra sensory perception or ESP – alleging the mysterious and sacred object is guarded by "entities" with an "unknown" power, a recently resurfaced declassified document claims. When a remote viewer is tasked with searching for a target, the desired object is written down on a piece of paper and put into an envelope. The remote viewer does not know what is written and is guided through the process by another person, retired US Army Chief Warrant Joe McMoneagle explained. McMoneagle, aka remote viewer #1, was the first to do the psychic phenomena experiments for the CIA. Remote viewer #32's vision described a secret Middle Eastern location of the object – which they don't know is the Ark – but they say is "protected by entities," the document reveals. "Target is a container. This container has another container inside of it. The target is fashioned of wood, gold and silver... similar in shape to a coffin and is decorated with seraphim," they relayed, per the file. "The target is protected by entities and can only be opened by those who are authorized to do so – this container will not/cannot be opened until the time is deemed correct," they said. "The purpose of the target is to bring people together. It has something to do with ceremony, memory, homage, the resurrection. There is an aspect of spirituality, information, lessons and historical knowledge," they said.

Note: Explore our resources on remote viewing programs. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on the mysterious nature of reality.

With the release of more John F. Kennedy assassination records from the National Archives, [a] little paragraph rose from the dust. We already knew the government was opening the mail of American citizens. But it turns out the CIA had as many as 300 of its employees engaged in various aspects of its mail "coverage" operation – which included reading Lee Harvey Oswald's letters – at a cost of $1 million a year. Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post editor and reporter ... published a startling conclusion on the Substack page that he edits, JFKFacts: "The fact pattern emerging from the new JFK documents shows that: A small clique in CIA counterintelligence was responsible for JFK's assassination." "I'm not saying that [the CIA's counterintelligence chief James Angleton] was the mastermind of the assassination. But he was the mastermind behind Oswald," Morley said. "The failure of Angleton to intercept or do anything about Oswald at the same time that he's running operations around him – that combination, yes – that tells me Angleton played a complicit role in Kennedy's assassination." The FBI memo reveals information that had been hidden until now: "The envelopes were microfilmed and the names and addresses appearing thereon were indexed with IBM equipment. Several months ago CIA began opening some of this mail, microfilming the contents and indexing pertinent data therein. Approximately 250,000 names have been indexed by CIA."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the Kennedy assassination.

Last Tuesday, former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in Manila and taken to the Hague, where he will be tried for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. From 2016-2022, Duterte's government carried out a campaign of mass killings of suspected drug users. It's estimated that 27,000 people, most of them poor and indigent, were executed without trial by police officers and vigilantes at his behest. Children were also routinely killed during Duterte's drug raids- both as collateral victims and as targets. While this happened, the United States provided tens of millions of dollars annually to both the Philippine military and the Philippine National Police. Many of the killings examined by [Human Rights Watch] followed a pattern: a group of plainclothes gunmen would enter the home of a suspected drug user, kill them without ever issuing an arrest, and plant drugs or weapons next to the body. Sometimes the gunmen would self-identify as police officers, and other times they would not. Police would also detain suspected drug users without charges and torture them for bribes. Less than a month after Duterte took office, then- Secretary of State John Kerry announced a $32 million weapons and training package specifically to support the Philippine National Police. Obama's administration authorized $90 million in military aid to the Philippines in 2016 and roughly $1 billion during the 8 years he was in office.

Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.

The Trump administration's unveiling Tuesday of more than 2,000 documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy set off a scramble for any scraps of revelatory information. The newly unredacted files reveal details about CIA agents and operations that the agency kept secret for decades. [A] 1964 document delves into the CIA's operations out of Mexico City at the time, revealing that the agency had no agents actively operating from Cuba. But the agency had "a number of sources with access to Cuba in third party nationals who are debriefed each time they return to Mexico City from Cuba," according to the ... file. Questions surrounding the CIA's activity in Mexico City arose after a previous document release revealed that Oswald had visited the Cuban Consulate and the Soviet Embassy there weeks before the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination. [Another] one-page document divulges that Manuel Machado Llosas – treasurer of the Mexican revolutionary movement and a friend of Cuban president and dictator Fidel Castro – was a CIA agent. Machado Llosas was slated to be stationed in Mexico City, where the document says the CIA planned to "use him to report on the activities of Cuban revolutionaries" and leverage his friendship with Castro and other Cuban leaders so he could act as a "‘political action' asset." [A] newly unredacted memo reveals that the CIA surveilled Washington Post reporter Michael Getler.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the JFK assassination.

Five years ago, at the urging of federal officials, much of the United States locked down to stop the spread of COVID – a decision that, over time, polarized the country and changed the relationship between many Americans and their government. Now, two prominent political scientists are making the case that there's no clear evidence that those lockdowns saved lives and that it's time for a national reckoning about the decision-making that led to those lockdowns in the first place. Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee [wrote] about [it in] their new book "In COVID's Wake." The biggest theme that runs through the book [is that] truth-seeking institutions did not function as well as they should have during COVID. There was a premature policy consensus. And there was an intolerance of criticism and divergent points of view that emerged fairly quickly in the pandemic, and that hurt us, that hurt our policy responses, that hurt our ability to course correct over the course of the pandemic as we learned more and had greater reason to course correct. There wasn't enough public deliberation about these matters. Too much power was accorded to narrow experts in public health and epidemiology, in particular. There should have been a wider conversation simply involving many more people with broader expertise. But it also should have involved ordinary people in the public, who after all, were being the ones asked to make sacrifices.

Note: The full text of this article is available here. Watch our Mindful News Brief on the origins of COVID. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on COVID corruption.

Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers – Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego – to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon's costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country's largest and most powerful defense contractors – Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman – posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC. The very notion of a "military-industrial complex" linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address. In 2024, just five companies – Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) – claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and military corruption.

Business is booming for Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) top deportation flight contractor. On February 28, ICE posted a previously unreported notice that it would award a no-bid contract to CSI Aviation to remove immigrants via flights. The contract is worth up to $128 million and will last for at least six months beginning on March 1, and possibly extend up to a year. ICE modified this contract last Friday to increase the number of ICE removal flights. The recent no-bid contract is the latest of numerous awards in the company's history with ICE, amounting to a combined total of at least $1.6 billion in federal funding since 2005, although business has especially surged in recent years. CSI has long worked with ICE to remove immigrants using planes, working with a network of subcontractors such as GlobalX. Last year, 74% of ICE's 1,564 removal flights were on GlobalX planes. In late 2017, 92 Somali immigrants on a CSI-contracted plane were forced to stay shackled for nearly two days. For about 23 hours, the plane simply sat on a tarmac, and the immigrants were not allowed off. "As the plane sat on the runway, the 92 detainees remained bound, their handcuffs secured to their waists, and their feet shackled together," according to a lawsuit. "The guards did not loosen the shackles, even when the deportees told them that the shackles were painful because they were too tight, that their arms and legs were swollen and were bruised. When the plane's toilets overfilled with human waste, some of the detainees were left to urinate into bottles or on themselves," the lawsuit states.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption and immigration enforcement corruption.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's February memo ordering all diversity, equity and inclusion-related content to be removed from Pentagon websites was so vague that military units were instructed to simply use keyword searches like "racism," "ethnicity," "history" and "first" when searching for articles and photos to remove. The implications of Hegseth's memo were overwhelming, since the Defense Department manages over 1,000 public-facing websites and a huge visual media database known as DVIDS – with officials expected to purge everything relevant within two weeks. As a result, the manual work of individual units was supplemented with an algorithm that also used keywords to automate much of the purge, officials explained. Other keywords officials were instructed to search for included "firsts" in history, including content about the first female ranger and first Black commanding general, as well as the words "LGBTQ," "historic," "accessibility," "opportunity," "belonging," "justice," "privilege," respect" and "values," according to a list reviewed by CNN. The department is now scrambling to republish some of the content, officials said. "Of all the things they could be doing, the places they're putting their focuses on first are really things that just don't matter ... This was literally a waste of our time," a defense official said. "This does absolutely nothing to make us stronger, more lethal, better prepared."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and military corruption.

The countless victims of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's bloody war on drugs are celebrating his arrest on charges of crimes against humanity as a momentous first step toward justice. Many of those who financed, enforced, and even continued in his state-sponsored killing campaign have not been held accountable. That list includes U.S. presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and current Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The Philippines remains one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in the Indo-Pacific region. In 2018 and 2024, two international people's tribunals in Brussels brought together families of victims of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines under both the Duterte and Marcos administrations. Both tribunals ... found the Trump and Biden administrations complicit in heavily funding state-sponsored killings in the Philippines. The killings targeted not only drug users, but also dissidents and activists as well. Duterte established, and Marcos beefed up and continued, the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, or NTF-ELCAC, which immediately weaponized the Philippines civilian bureaucracy to go after government critics and activists on the grounds that they were fronts for the Communist Party of the Philippines. With no due process, activists under Duterte and Marcos continued to be systematically killed, illegally arrested, and targeted by state forces, even going as far as to be subjected to abduction, torture, and forced to sign affidavits claiming to be captured guerrillas.

Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.

For decades, reports of unidentified craft, usually airborne, often over sensitive military and nuclear facilities across the United States (and around the world) have bedeviled officials. The recent drone incursions over military installations in New Jersey, Virginia, and other locations highlight the problem. To date, the Pentagon says it does not know who is controlling these objects. We do not from where they are being launched or on whose behalf. More worryingly, there appears to be a "capability gap" between what our drones can do and what these still-unidentified objects can do. David Grusch, a former high-ranking intelligence official with the National Geospace-Intelligence Agency ... asserts the US government is in possession of an unknown number of crashed and retrieved extraterrestrial craft, including "nonhuman biologics." According to a 2024 Yougov poll, "60% of Americans believe the U.S. government is concealing information about Unidentified Flying Objects." In 2024, Sens. Schumer and Rounds introduced the "UAP Disclosure Act," which would have mandated the release of nearly all relevant classified materials. When introducing the legislation, Schumer said, "The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena." The bill, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to make it out of Committee.

Note: Watch our latest video on UFO/UAP disclosure titled, "Beyond Fear: The Bigger Picture, UFOs, and Humanity's Incredible Potential." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on UFOs. Then explore the comprehensive resources provided in our UFO Information Center.

The for-profit prison company GEO Group has surged in value under President Donald Trump. Its stock price doubled after Election Day. But despite its soaring fortunes, the $4 billion company continues to resist having to pay detainees more than $1 a day for cleaning facilities where the government has forced them to live. At the 1,575-bed detention center GEO runs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tacoma, Washington, detainees once prepared meals, washed laundry and scrubbed toilets, doing jobs that would otherwise require 85 full-time employees, the company estimated. The state's minimum wage at the time was $11 an hour. (It's now $16.66.) In 2017, Washington sued GEO to enforce it, and in October 2021 a federal jury ruled unanimously in the state's favor. This year, GEO and Washington are back in court – for a third time – as the company tries to reverse the earlier decision that sided with the state. Mike Faulk, a spokesperson for the Washington state attorney general's office, said testimony in the minimum-wage issue highlights the problem with housing detainees in private prisons: profit motive. Not only did GEO pay $1 a day for cleaning in Tacoma, it budgeted less than $1 per meal that each detainee ate, one kitchen worker testified. "So the grade of food is abysmal," Faulk said of the detainee's testimony. "He routinely picked out grasshoppers/insects from the food." Conditions in Tacoma are worsening as the number of detainees rises.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption and immigration enforcement corruption.

Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.